Curiosity in Motion: SELETTI and IQOS Reimagine the Italian Piazza at Dubai Design Week
SELETTI brings his signature playful surrealism to Dubai
Stefano Seletti has never been interested in the ordinary. The Italian creative director behind SELETTI has built an entire universe out of the unexpected – porcelain that looks like fast food, lamps sculpted like toylike animals, objects that feel more like punchlines than homeware. His work is playful, irreverent, a little surreal, and almost impossible to ignore. So when he decided to reimagine something as iconic as an Italian piazza, of course it wasn’t going to be predictable.
This is the spirit that arrives in D3 for Dubai Design Week, where SELETTI’s global collaboration with IQOS takes shape as Sensorium Piazza – an installation that flips the traditional square into a sensory playground, blurring the lines between physical and digital worlds. It’s immersive without being overwhelming and very much in the language that has made SELETTI a cult favourite across the design world.
Inside the space, the familiar architecture of a piazza dissolves into shifting perspectives, reflective surfaces and unexpected technological interventions. It’s a creative collision born from a shared belief between IQOS and SELETTI: that curiosity leads to reinvention. For IQOS (a brand anchored in innovation and a future beyond traditional smoking) the partnership is an opportunity to take that curiosity into the cultural realm.
The collaboration first surfaced during Milan Design Week, where Sensorium Piazza quickly became one of the most talked-about installations of the FuoriSalone. It then evolved into a creative workshop at SELETTI’s studio in Cicognara, Italy, where twenty multidisciplinary artists gathered to explore a simple but provocative prompt: What happens when you reframe the familiar? Among them was Saudi calligrapher Ahmed Al Sulaimani, whose work now appears inside the Dubai installation, adding a regional narrative to this international moment.
At the centre of the project is also the IQOS ILUMA i x SELETTI Limited Edition, a metallic, gold-touch design piece that feels more like a collectible object and rooted in the idea that technology can be both functional and deeply expressive.
Throughout Dubai Design Week, the IQOS x SELETTI space hosted daily talks, encounters, and open walkthroughs, echoing the communal energy of a real piazza. Only here, the interactions are heightened by light, movement, and unexpected details that make the installation feel alive.
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